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I haven't done much reading on this subject in a while, but I recall from Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories that the issue is not that CICO is somehow flawed, but rather that there are meta-metabolic effects (if that makes sense) from the food we eat that ends up changing the factors in the CICO equation. In other words, none of the variables are static, and they in fact depend upon the nature of calories eaten.

The canonical example: because high levels of glucose in the blood can be fatally toxic, the body must spike insulin levels after a (simple) carbohydrate-rich meal in order to get rid of it quickly. One effect of insulin is an increase in fat synthesis and storage of triglycerides in fat cells. A diet rich in simple carbohydrates can result in chronically elevated insulin levels, which means that the body is constantly stashing calories away in fat cells.

The point is that the "caloric equation" that you refer to is a grossly oversimplified model of human metabolism that has led to what might be called Goodhart's Law of dietary advice.

All of this is true, but of course Gary himself advises a low carb high fat diet which has its own problems. So a more complete version of the above without straying too far in the other direction would be something like CICO + a balanced diet that seeks to hit most macro and micronutrients as well. For anyone interested, Stan Efferding's Vertical Diet is by far the best guide I've seen personally to putting together a nutrition program that seeks to hit these goals. (I'm not getting any money for saying that, of course.)

Differential equations are a bugger. You get four of them, one for each mechanism group trying to adjust your weight up or down by changing intake or expenditure. Some are physiological, some psychological. If they get out of whack, you get weight gains or losses. But this is non-trivial non-linear stuff that’s pretty much impossible to keep track of even if you have the right memtal models.

The consequence of that is that morbidly obese people are literally starving while eating thousands of carb-laden calories a day over their base needs, their fat stealing the blood sugar from their organs and muscles when their organs become insulin resistant.

There's a bit of science coming out about that process and identifying methods to break this cycle is big business, with semaglutide injections, gastric bypass surgeries, and low-carb diets being just some of the first successful methods found to break the cycle.

That's a whole lot of acronyms. Any links for people who want to learn more or learn how to calculate/measure those things?

Stronger By Science has had a recent series of articles on these topics, I would recommend starting there. The last one was just posted today and I haven't dug too deep.

From Mass to Energy: The Basic Physiology of Calories https://www.strongerbyscience.com/energy-balance-calories/

Calories and Weight: From the Lab to the Real World https://www.strongerbyscience.com/calories-weight/

The Definitive Diet Setup Guide: How to Build and Adjust a Smart Nutrition Plan https://www.strongerbyscience.com/diet/

TDEE = total daily energy expenditure

- the amount of total energy your body burns throughout a day (fun fact, just by living you burn calories)

RMR = resting metabolic rate

- calories your body burns in a day just being a body (pumping blood, thinking, etc)

TEF = thermic effect of feeding

- it takes energy to digest food

NEAT = non-exercise activity thermogenesis

- non-exercise is just differentiating between things a person intentionally does as exercise--like walking to work vs going on the treadmill at a gym.

Here's one link in a sea of many that talks about these concepts [0].

[0] https://www.opexfit.com/blog/how-to-calculate-tdee-total-dai...

TDEE = Total daily energy expenditure. How many calories you burn in a day.

RMR = Resting metabolic rate (aka basal metabolic rate). How many calories your body burns just to sustain itself. If you were in a coma this is roughly how much you'd burn.

TEF = Thermic effect of food. Your body burns a small amount of calories just digesting your food.

EAT = Exercise activity thermogenesis. How many calories you burn while exercising.

NEAT = Non-exercise activity thermogenesis. How much you burn on top of your RMR but isn't exercise. For example, walking around a retail store burns calories even if it isn't categorized as exercise.

These are the four components of your metabolism (TDEE).

If your goal is fat loss, I wouldn't bother too much with trying to calculate all of those.

The process is simple: Go to an online TDEE calculator. Put in the numbers, get an expected TDEE (total daily energy expenditure, measured in calories). Then eat those amount of calories, minus 300. If after two weeks you haven't lost weight, do 200 calories less. Repeat until you are consistently losing weight. You might have to periodically lower your calories again, even if everything was working before.

And be prepared that the online calculators grossly overestimate the daily expenditure, even well regarded ones like this:

https://www.niddk.nih.gov/bwp

I'd take the advice posted elsewhere, start with 1500/1300 kcal for men/women and see how it goes for a month.

Make an experimental study where you put people with high levels of stress hormones in one group and people with low levels of stress hormones in the other group. Have both calculate TDEE and eat equally fewer calories than their TDEE, and have both conduct the same amount of exercise. After a few months collect data and compare the two groups (this would measure the effect stress has on fat uptake, metabolism, and more).

Second experiment we can do is the exact one above but rather than having two groups with different levels of stress, have one group that are children to parents who experienced starvation during pregnancy (the dutch hunger winter study). A third group could be people that got raised in low calorie environment but that now eat the same diet high calorie diet as the control (an other study done on indigenous island populations that got introduced to a western diet).

We can also make a study that looks on exercise only. Have one group doing an activity which they really enjoy and love. The second group do the exact same amount of exercise and burn the exact same amount of exercise calories, but are forced to do something which they hate every second of. This study will be somewhat similar to the first one that covers stress, but will illustrate the health effect involuntarily exercise vs voluntarily exercise for the same amount of burned calories.

My own Effective weight loss guide is:

- Reduce stress.

- Find an physical activity that you enjoy and don't stop until you find one. Do not force yourself to do a specific type of exercise if you are constantly thinking about when it is going to end.

- Look to reducing calorie uptake, through by doing the two things above this will come somewhat natural.

> - Reduce stress.

That's nice, but hardly actionable in my experience. If stress were that easy to reduce why wouldn't someone have already done it?

Note I didn't say "easy". Stress has a massive effect on insulin production and even what specific parts of the body that takes up the energy. Stress is a significant factor in determining if that extra amount of calories is going to the brain in order to allow higher focus, or into fat cells in order to address the crisis that those stress hormones are indicating. Should the body focus on sexual reproduction and growth, or prepare for that starvation which is looming? It all depend.

Maybe the ordering above is a bit wrong. Start by finding some physical activity that one likes and want to continue doing that. If you find going to the gym as being meditative then do that, but if it gives you stress then continue looking. Once you found something, try make it into a routine and let it become a thing where you go to reduce stress.

Good advice, and keep in mind that calculating TDEE is complicated and often unintuitive, in particular:

"a long-term increase in activity does not directly translate into an increase in total energy expenditure (TEE) because other components of TEE may decrease in response" [0]

However, this is all happening in the margins - overconsumption of even a couple hundred extra calories a day (that's like, two to four Oreos) will result in packing on a dozen or so pounds per year, regardless of activity level.

But I'm not a scientist, so feel free to correct me.

[0] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)...

Due to metabolic adaptation I’m not sure just keeping above 1500kcal is the best approach. From what I gather it’s still not a fully understood phenomenon but my hypothesis is that people overweight due to metabolic problems (insulin resistance) have problems satisfying their TDEE from stored fat, so the body is forced to respond by lowering TDEE.

It’s probably rather easy to keep insulin levels up even with just 1500kcal depending on how and when you eat. So you could end up just making the problem worse.

My personal approach is to ignore the calories completely instead going for a lax IF: Eat only if, and when, hungry (actual hunger), eat only the “good” foods. Or taken together “eat only when it’s worth it”.

I do think many people would get pretty far with less sugar (to keep things simple, count wheat as sugar) and more fiber though.

I didn't know what any of those acronyms meant, so I hit DDG:

https://calculator-online.net/tdee-calculator/#What-Does-TDE...

This is fine until you get serious about the exercise. Which happens very gradually. Then you’ll find that you easily “bonk” during high-intensity long workouts having exhausted your internal glycogen reserves. At this point (and I’m here) you have to figure out how to supply your body with sufficient calories balanced in a way that’s supportive of your development without gaining weight. I am yet to figure this out. Eating 4000 kcal of balanced food given the limitations our boys has in terms of glucose and protein absorption isn’t easy and my body appears to be especially reluctant to replenish liver glycogen instead of storing fat.

I am 178cm tall, and now 65kg, I can easily eat 4KCal several days in a row and not only not gain weight but loose it. It depends on many things, and to just name CICO is absurd. Do you know how calories are measured out of food? Do you then think the body burn the food the same way they burn food? I don't think you know what you are talking about. It's all about hormones, which is related to your environment (inner and outer). How you think, what you put in your body (not only food), how you move, how toxic is your place, the weather, etc

That's the way the body is supposed to work. When you take in too many calories, you body should fill its fat reserves and your muscle and organ glycogen stores, and then ramp up your energy output to burn off the rest, and any that it can't burn off should be shunted out of the body (you can excrete excess blood sugar in urine, for instance).

For obese people, what happens is the body muscles and organs become insulin resistant, but your fat does not, so your body fat is well fed before the rest of your body (other than your vital organs).

From there, there is no excess energy in your muscles and organs as they're getting just enough to function and sometimes not even that much, so your body makes more fat cells to store as much excess blood sugar as possible and then finally your kidneys filter and excrete the excess sugars remaining.

This process is a perfect storm for diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and preferentially gaining fat while being tired and hungry all of the time, and the only way to break it is to cut carbs so that your blood sugar doesn't spike and then to exercise to deplete your muscle glycogen stores so that when your blood sugar does spike it goes to your muscles first, and then do that consistently for the rest of your life if you were in the group affected by this.

I really like how you explained that. I haven't though about it in the terms of that fat tissue is not getting insuline resistance. Thanks for sharing your point, it broadens mine. Yeah, so I just wanted to point that out, to show that the theory behing CICO doesnt work out. It's not calories in vs calories out, it's a whole holistic approach to health. If you keep carbs up, there is no way down, no matter how many calories in vs calories out.

In my personal experience, consuming a deficit below TDEE without concerning macros isn't enough to consistently achieve my weight loss goals.

I track everything using myfitnesspal and there's a strong correlation in my weightless during periods where I make an effort to consume around 30% of calories from protein. During less strict periods, my protein intake is usually around 20%. While my calories consumed remains the same, the higher protein diet is far more effective for weight/fatloss.

Indeed, there are some studies coming out pointing out that the hunger mechanism may be more related to a minimum-protein intake than we preoviously thought. Which means, you may stay hungry as long as a minimum protein intake is satisfied. I don't think there is one way out of the problem, but this seems to be a good one also

All models are bad. Some are useful. Something like that :)

I agree. The caloric intake models are often terrible for groups like stress eaters. Eventually IMO there will be equally bad, but also subjectively-useful methods for treating things like overwork and boundaries-crossed situations as numeric models which can be examined alongside caloric intake models. Like a TDEE which better incorporates what we'd now consider subjective psychological stress.

I mostly use set a calorie goal, eat the same types of healthy foods and adjust it up or down a bit based on my weight change rate aka hackers diet style trailing average and such. It’s simple and not too stressful once you get a good menu of food and exercise system in place.

It can work really well for sure. I lost 50 pounds that way after using other methods for the first 50 pounds. That was about 5 years ago. I still remember how frustrating some of the TDEE models were when I was testing them out. Somehow a 500 calorie bonus budget could appear in there and throw you off for a few days.

A few points:

- Why multiply by physical activity level? Shouldn't it be TDEE = BMR + TEF + NEAT + EAT?

- Calorie density is the only thing I'd add to your recommendations. As they say, you can't out-exercise a bad diet.

I've lost 40 pounds by basically using your recommendations plus the above tweaks. It really is that simple. However, there are people out there who make a lot of money complicating it.

> Why multiply by physical activity level?

I was describing how TDEE is calculated. I wasn't telling you to multiple TDEE by something, TDEE has that multiplication built right in.

If you look at any TDEE calculator (of which there are hundreds) they'll ask you your PAL e.g.: https://tdeecalculator.net

More info on the PAL here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_activity_level

> Calorie density is the only thing I'd add to your recommendations.

I've seen more people successfully lose weight by NOT changing WHAT they eat than I have completely upending their diets and burning out. Then they return to their original diets and gaining it all back.

As long as you eat below your TDEE, you can eat whatever you want. If you want to only eat microwave mini-pizza, you do you. You can still lose weight that way even if it is objectively not healthy.

Volume eating may be a useful tool, but that's all it is, a tool. You cannot rely on volume to stay on the path.

There are many options between upending your diet and only eating microwave pizza. As with most things I think the middle path is best.

On my journey I found it very helpful to find alternative ways of doing things that would allow me to eat more of my favorite foods while staying under my calorie limit.

> Calculate your TDEE. TDEE is ((RMR + TEF + NEAT) * Physical Activity Level).

definitions needed

your first step is complicated. Its pretty simple to "cut out anything with sugar in the top 5 ingredients" and win with a large majority of the population. Remove potatoes, rice, and bread, and you'll win with a super majority. That's pretty simple.

> Remove potatoes, rice, and bread, and you'll win with a super majority.

My problem with simplistic "rule of thumb" advice like this is that people will still eat a bunch of "healthy whole foods" like peanut butter and wonder why they aren't losing weight. Also, potatoes are practically a superfood - full of vitamins and minerals - and people should eat them (in moderation), not completely avoid them.

Knowing and tallying the caloric content of all the foods you're eating, either directly (by weighing your food) or indirectly (through a proxy like Weight Watchers points) seems to yield the best results.

Yes, this requires more effort than just "don't eat white bread."

Whole baked / boiled potatoes = probably not that bad all in all (as long as they are not slathered in butter and cheese and sour cream and bacon.

French fries, hash browns, vodka = probably not all that good.

I get the sugar bit but i don't get why you would want to remove potatoes or rice?

Compared to other vegetables they're pretty calorie dense, especially given how big a portion people typically eat to feel full. They're often fried in a lot of oil as well.

If you're trying to diet you can basically choose between just boiled potatoes or a mix of other vegetables that can be cooked in a light amount of oil/spices.

cooked potatoes have a high glycemic index. So does white rice.

This is where the details matter. Your body has an innate ability to know when it needs more food. You get hungry. If you eat a bunch of foods with a high glycemic response, it will be absorbed quickly, trigger an insulin response, which captures as much of the blood sugar as possible and stores it to fat. After this is complete, your stomach is empty and your body tells you you're hungry. If you count calories, then you realize you can't eat MORE, so you go hungry. This tends to end badly (i.e. Snickers Hangry commercials). However, if you eat low glycemic response foods, they tend to hang around your digestive tract longer, not trigger a large insulin response, and feed your body's caloric needs as the day goes on. Further, when eating typical low glycemic response foods, you'll typically lose interest in eating before you're stuffed. Overeating a bowl of pasta is fairly easy, where as overeating prime rib becomes more difficult (until you introduce the baked potato and BAM you're back in carb land overeating).

There is quite a bit of glossing over even finer details here. This assumes every single calorie is digested (doesn't pass through), that every calorie digested is consumed by cellular activity (not removed by your kidneys).

Just like any model, its not exact.

If you cut out breads, rice, potatoes, and anything with sugar in the top 5 ingredients, and eat when you're hungry (not because its 12pm!) and stop when you lose interest, you'll likely lose weight (assuming you had issues before). This obviously doesn't apply to people with broken control systems like diabetes.

Thanks for the detailed explanation. A follow up question formed from my own experience: if i eat a very low glycemic index based food (sardines) and compare that to a high one (oats with millk), calorie for calorie, the latter keeps me full a lot longer and also keeps the hunger down for much longer.

Based on your explanation I would have assumed the opposite though? I tried this first thing in the morning, and it didn't matter if i ate 300 or 500 calories.

Same goes for lunch. Salmon with spinach is a lot less filling/quicker hunger response compared to less salmon but with rice instead of spinach.

I don't eat sardines so I can't offer any suggestions there. I do know that it can take some time to transition. my best recommendation when starting is to not count calories the first week. Eat when you're hungry, stop when you're not. The full transition is 21-30 days usually. But after you transition, its great.

Glycemic index is not reliable by itself: https://bodyrecomposition.com/nutrition/guide-glycemic-index...

Starchy carbohydrates are the biggest calorie source in most people's diets if they aren't bingeing on sugar or junk food.

Most people can't eat 1000 calories of steak or chicken (that's close to a pound of meat). 1000 calories of non-starch vegetables is a vast quantity.

You need to hold about 300 calories per day below your metabolic rate to lose weight at about a pound per week--that's about one potato or one cup of rice or two slices of bread. That's relatively straightforward to remove from your diet.

The easiest way to get rid of calories is to remove anything carbohydrate heavy.

> You can do very well believing "a calorie is a calorie" even if it is technically inaccurate

I used to think that, but now I'm not so sure.

In 2017 I spent a lot of effort counting calories (using an app to help keep track). To hit my target (losing a half pound per week), I mostly ate smaller portions and occasionally skipped meals; I didn't really change what I ate, just the amount of it. I rarely hit my target of 0.5lbs per week (often it was half that), losing barely 10lbs over 6 months. (Unfortunately, I gained all of it back in 2018.)

In 2020, once the pandemic hit and restaurants closed, my gf and I started cooking a lot more often than we had previously. So the meals were very different from the restaurant meals we'd usually eat. Our usual meals would be some sort of protein (chicken, steak, pork, lamb), with a vegetable side (usually something potato-based or pasta, though often greens as well). We also started intermittent fasting, and would only eat between roughly noon and 6pm. I lost 15lbs in 4 months (a little over a pound per week, on average).

Exercise-wise it was counter-intuitive as well. In 2017 I was running quite a bit, perhaps 8-10 miles per week. In 2020 my running buddy and I weren't meeting up (pandemic) for a while, so I was hardly running at all, maybe averaging just 2-4 miles per week.

Yet somehow my weight loss in 2020 was much faster and easier than in 2017. The main differences were drastic diet changes and intermittent fasting (and, paradoxically, exercising less). This year I've gained back around 8-10lbs of the 15lbs I lost last year. I'm still (mostly) doing the intermittent fasting, but we're going out to restaurants again, and we've been cooking less often, and sometimes even getting takeout/delivery at home when we're lazy, something we weren't doing all that often during the most isolated parts of the pandemic.

This is of course just my anecdotal experience, and there are a few variables that changed (the intermittent fasting may have played a larger role than I expected), so I certainly can't point to just the one thing here (changing macronutrient consumption vs. just eating less). But this is also making me realize that this is just a complicated topic, and while "weight gain/loss = calories in - calories out" might be a good starting point, I don't think it's sufficient to build a weight loss plan on.

Regardless of the weight loss plan, the most important thing is coming up with a diet that you're happy with and can stick to after you've hit your weight goals. While I haven't gained all the weight back that I lost during the pandemic, I do feel heavier than I'd like to be, and I find it very demotivating that it was so easy to erase much of the progress I made last year.

> Don't eat less than 1500 / 1300 calories for men/women respectively and try to get some nutrients.

Fasting has tremendous benefits, including an increase in cellars autophagy and down regulation of IGF-1.

Crash dieting is not healthy, but that is a psychological issue and not a metabolic one.

I think fasting should only be done after talking to your doctor.

Oftentimes, fasting is just another name for normalizing starving oneself, which is a type of disordered eating.

Extended fasting is widely prevalent in many cultures, but I wouldn't consider those parts of the world as having eating disorders. Starvation in a bigger sense is a prolonged deficiency in nutrients and energy needs. Fasting doesn't have to be a set number of hours/days either. You fast every time you go to sleep.

Starvation mode is something most people do not understand. I can’t count the number of morbidly obese people I’ve heard tell me they need to eat 6 small meals per day so their metabolism doesn’t shift into starvation mode and they stop losing weight.

The few studies we have on actual starvation suggest that the body’s BMR does not change substantially until > 10 days without food.

Fasting and low carb diets have very similar effects, principally keeping insulin levels very reduced.

> I think fasting should only be done after talking to your doctor.

This is what I’m talking about. You been told that it’s dangerous. The human body is incredibly well equipped to go a few days without food.

Fasting for a day is absolutely not something that requires medical advice.

To me it could be. I've seen disordered eating in my family (and have done it myself). to me, it's not a good idea, and anectdata on something like my health isn't what I suggest when people are looking for advice.

Running right into "don't eat for a couple of days" is a lot more extreme than, "take a good look at your diet and make small adjustments, over time". I know it's not sexy or provocative, but it does work.

And that's why I preempted my post with, "talk to an expert" rather than dismissing the whole idea. ie: don't trust some random person on an VC tech forum.

Is there any research on the window from which fasting becomes a crash diet?

E.g., if I average 1200 calories over 3 days is that a fast whereas averaging 1200 over a month becomes a crash diet?

Averaging 1200 over 3 days doesn't actually say anything about when you are eating and whether you are fasting.

That’s what I’m getting at. Broad claims like “fasting isn’t unhealthy” need more narrow definitions about what constitutes a “fast”

Has the term "crash diet" ever really been raised to any kind of status that is attached to objective measurement? That would be interesting if so.

If a crash diet description involves averaging, especially in the 1200 zone and over several weeks, to me that's less of a crash diet and more of an emergent norm that ought to be figured out quickly. Is this person reading /r/1200isplenty, or are they completely depressed, or what? The details are interesting and relevant.

If I had to model-ize crash dieting I'd start with something like a caloric deficit > 20% below TDEE, attempted multiple times, combined with the outcome of not meeting or maintaining target weight goals.

Crash dieting is typically the quick reversal of a diet. For instance I eat 500 kcal/day for a week, then then the following month I go back to eating a 500 kcal surplus and more than offset my losses.

I would not consider 1200 over 3 days (400/day) to be a fast. I would consider 1200 in a month (40/day) to be a fast (I also think that is far to aggressive).

Fasting for a day is different than chronically eating < 1500/1300.

Fasting and what OP said are not mutually exclusive.

OP didn’t say chronically. You did.

Fasting and what OP said are mutually exclusive. OP was touting the typical 500 calorie deficit max advice which is rule of thumb meant to keep people prepared for a longer term change, instead of an immediate fix.

The problem with a huge amount of diet advice is that it’s psychological, not biological.